Jean Paul Riopelle was born in Montreal in 1923. He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Montreal from 1943-44 and had his first solo exhibition in 1945. In 1946 he participated in the first Automatist Exhibition in Montreal. He and Leduc organized an automatists' exhibition at Galerie de Luxembourg in Paris in 1947, and the following year Riopelle took up permanent residence there.

Subsequently, Riopelle's work has been extensively exhibited internationally, including the Guggenheim International and the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York; Museum of Modern Art in Brazil; the Galerie d'Art Moderne in Basel, Switzerland; the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa; the XXVI Venice Biennial in Italy, and the XXXI International Biennial of Art in Italy where he was awarded the Unesco prize in 1962.